Eliyahu M. Goldratt Quotes

The more complicated the situation seems to be, the simpler solution must be. .. People believe that reality is complex, and therefore they are looking for sophisticated explanations for complicated solutions. .. Reality it is actually simple.

[Throughput is the] rate at which the system generates money through sales.

Companies are so immersed in the mentality of saving money that they forget that the whole intention of a project is not to save money but to make money.

sit there marveling that we’re going to reduce the efficiency of some operations and make the entire plant more productive.

Tell me how you measure me and I’ll tell you how I will behave.

In order to significantly increase sales we have to increase the perception of value of the market for our products.

What is the real goal? Nobody here has even asked anything that basic.

Putting it precisely, activating a resource and utilizing a resource are not synonymous.

Quality alone cannot be the goal. It’s important. But it’s not the goal.

A third way to waste a bottleneck’s time is to make it work on parts you don’t need.” “You mean spare parts?” asks Bob. “I mean anything that isn’t within the current demand,

Throughput,” he says, “is the rate at which the system generates money through sales.

Deciding that the company is wasting too much money on duplicated efforts and thus moving to a more centralized mode. Ten years later, we want to encourage entrepreneurship and we move back to decentralization.

Bob comes into the office with a smear of grease on his white shirt over the bulge of his beer gut, and he’s talking nonstop about what’s going on with the breakdown of the automatic testing machines. “Bob,” I tell him, “forget about that for now.

Well, since we started keeping data on the bottlenecks, I’ve been noticing I’m able to predict several weeks in advance what each bottleneck will be working on at a particular time. See, as long as I know exactly what’s in queue, I just take the average setup and process times for each type of part, and I’m able to calculate when each batch should clear the bottleneck. Because we’re only dealing with one work center, with much less dependency, we can average the statistical fluctuations and get a better degree of accuracy.

Flow means that inventories in the operation are moving. When inventory is not moving, inventory accumulates. Accumulation of inventory takes up space. Therefore, an intuitive way to achieve better flow is to limit the space allowed for inventory to accumulate. To achieve better flow, Ford limited the space allotted for work-in-process between each two work centers.